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Microsoft Unveils New Design Studio
shibashaba writes "NewsFactor is reporting that Microsoft has just released a new design studio consisting of the Acrylic Graphic Design, Sparkle Interactive Design and Quartz Web Designer Software. Supposedly the goal is not to compete head to head with the proposed Adobe/Macromedia merger but to turn developers into designers. According to Jupiter Research, The days when a designer worked alone have been traded in for an interactive world in which designers often work hand-in-hand with developers. "Microsoft is trying to address what it believes is a legitimate and longstanding problem in the design market."
I can think of another legitimate and longstanding problem that needs to be addressed.
They can't be two more opposed jobs in a game shop than designers and developpers.
Heck, I've been doing tech support for a design shop with both graphic and industrial designers, and those people have totally no clue in what makes a computer tick.
""Microsoft is second to none in terms of developing tools that fill a gap," he said. An example of the company's ability to redefine a market is the original Outlook software introduced in the mid-1990s. At the time, there was a hodgepodge of contact management and e-mail software, said Wilcox, but no one had combined the two.
Microsoft perceived a problem and an opportunity. "And you can't truly say that Outlook is an e-mail program. They actually redefined the market."
Lotus Notes?
No, they can't, it's a developer, trained by M$ to be a designer, using the new suite that find this name, and Marketing though it was sounding cool...
While both skills are creative endeavors, they are truly different disciplines. There's only a handful of developers that I've worked with that have truly been able to bridge both talents successfully.
Seriously -- you can't fit a square peg in a round hole. Trying to turn logical artists into visual artists is likely to produce just as many terrible looking applications -- they'll just be crappy in a 3-D, aqua-ripoff sort of way.
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
... Designers.. Designers!!
One is left brain. One is right brain.
Asking a coder to do artwork is silly.
The Adobe and Macromedia people understand that artsies like to use artsy tools.
The whole idea of getting developers to 'design' is stupid.
This will benefit MS in the long run - the goal is not to take programmers and turn them into graphic designers, but rather to make sure that the programmers understand the principles of good design. If the person who designs something cannot communicate with the person who builds it, that will cause serious problems - and with Microsoft products, it sometimes has. Any decision that is even slightly ambiguous or left from the design instructions might be made by a person who has no schooling in design principles, and this aims to correct that. That is the reason Apple UIs, while flawed as well, are generally superior to the Windows UI (and this is coming from a very big Windows fan) in terms of basic design principles. Programmers often underestimate or misunderstand the importance (or even existence!) of concrete, in-depth ideas of what it is about the design of interactive products - universally - makes them easy and pleasant to use.
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I just wanted to point out that the idea is not all to shabby, if not it's suggested implementation. Having a peice of common software that designers and developers (who are separate) can use could reasonably cut some time during the entire process of making some sort of application. I'm not very familiar with the interaction that goes on between devs and designers, but being able to refer to common aspects of a program could help (I don't see how it'd hurt).
I not saying we should deliver trucks of money to Redmond for this, but the idea isn't awful (perhaps an OSS version?)
Before you die, you see DoubleRing...
" to turn developers into designers. "
Don't let your Vet perform your dental work and don't let your dentist neuter your pets .
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
After recently attending the PDC in Los Angeles, I must say that this seems to be a big step forward. The separation between code and GUI-design/layout is a great step forward. Designing and changing GUIs should not rest on the developer (You know you've been there, programmatically moving a button two pixels to the right to align with some text label or somesuch, worrying about how the size of the button text will look in german, etc. That's just plain dumb) but rather on the GUI designer.
You know, you could've just said "Interface Builder" and saved yourself a bunch of typing.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I must say MVC is a big step forward. In 1978.
This developer/designer split allows me as a programmer to focus on writing the actual logic code. The designer can then change the GUI-layout at will, without having to involve me in the process at all.How the hell have you people been programming for the past decade? :( I've only been doing this for a couple years, Cocoa, RoR, php, some C command-line Unix stuff, but I know what to expect from a GUI development platform.
Now, we can return to our scheduled programming of bashing at the Redmond Beast with all the might we care to summon.Hmmm. Only say it if you mean it. I don't mean to be snarky, but this is the fourth post I've seen commending XAML and Avalon and Vista, and each time the poster doesn't seem to realize that other GUI developers have had these features for decades in some cases. It is good for MS that MS gets its house in order, but these innovations, despite the hundreds of millions they have poured into them, get Windows to where other platforms were in 2000.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
While certainly for large teams it makes sense for people to specialize, and for you're hard core programmers to not also handle the visual design.
However, I think it's a cop out to claim them to be so totally different and "asking a coder to do artwork is silly".
I work with many people who are excellent coders and who are also excellent designers. In fact, some of the best programmers I know are also artists (painters, photographers or musicians) and can do excellent web and UI design.
So, if you're a coder who can't do art, that's fine. But if you are a coder who can't do art who wants to, don't let these guys discourage you.
And to Microsoft, the more tools the better. Maybe one will actually be good.
Although you will find a lot of people who are both musicians and programmers.
:-)
It comes down to structure. Programming is all about elegence in structure. The more structured your code is, the better it is. The more you look for elegent solutions rather than sloppy hacks, the nicer your code looks. (And gets Ooos and Ahhs of approval from your cow-orkers.)
The visual arts have a lot to do with blasting emotion onto the canvas in a fluid way. Programmers don't do "fluid", they do structure. Thus a programmer will tend to give you something utterly sterile like Motif or Java Look and Feel. The only one who will appreciate it is a programmer. Yet an artist will create something like Quartz with rounded edges, flowing colors, and other aestehtics designed to communicate something on a more primal level.
Now when you get to music, structure again begins to rule. There are very specific models for producing music, and many a structured thinker tends to find a way to unconciously communicate through that structure. If you fail to maintain certain structures, it will no longer sound like music. Rather, it will sound like a bad jam session done in somebody's garage.
While sterotypes are always dangerous, I think you'll find that the stronger artists have a talent or strong appreciation for poetry. Poetry may offer them an outlet to express their emotions with only a minimum of structure standing in their way. And the best part about poetic structure is that new structures can be formed based on what sounds good to the ear. You aren't constrained to a few choices in meter, note length, or any other structures imposed on music. It's all optional.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Interactive is a poor word choice; the word you want is multidisciplinary.
I vote "mis-modded". I think you were trying to be funny. But there is a serious point here, nonetheless. Allow me to retort:
First of all, this "left brain, right brain" thing is just nonsense. Ask a neurologist. There's a popular myth that revolves around separation of brain function into creative and analytical thinking. The problem is that is complete bullshit. If you take a normal brain, there are "creative" centers in both hemispheres, and likewise with analytical skills.
Biology and evolution don't divide skills up into "creative" and "analytical" categories. The binary division of the two is a human conceit--not without its uses, but it has no place in talking about how the brain works.
Now, THAT being said, "left brain" and "right brain" are, regardless of science, common rhetorical devices used to divide people into analytical and creative categories. Lots of people have aptitudes one way or the other, so it's easy to think that you're naturally one or the other, and that's the way God made you, so be it.
But I think that's bullshit, too. I know far too many incredibly creative engineers, architects, and coders--look at www.hackaday.com if you can't think of any you know, yourself. And I know a hell of a lot of artists and musicians who sat down in front of Photoshop or Pro Tools for the first time as said "Ah-ha!" and did brilliant things.
I'll bet that a lot of people discover one particular aptitude early and focus on that, failing to develop other skills. When I was 12, I was about as good of a programmer as I was a piano player or a painter. But since I spent a lot of time coding, guess what, I'm a pretty damn good coder and a shitty piano player. That doesn't mean I couldn't have been a good piano player, just that it takes years to get good.
Comments are still a little thin, but I suspect we're going to hear a lot more people complaining about how coders can design, and designers can't code. I say, right now, fuck that. I know far too many people who bridge the gap, sometimes iat surprising moments. There are smart people, and there are not-so-smart people.
So who knows? Maybe there's something to this idea of "designer-cum-developer". From the tone of the comments, it doesn't seem like anyone's tried it, much.
Is it just me or did Newsfactor just completely miss the point and then make one up?
Newsfactor says "Microsoft wants to turn developers into designers." They also mention how Microsoft wants to eliminate the role of the designer.
Microsoft says it's to "Facilitate collaboration between designers and developers...." They talk about separating code from UI design and creating a back and forth channel between designers and developers.
I think I'll go with Microsoft's line, since they are actually the ones who wrote the software.
Please stop confusing design with art.
J
Christ, do you have any idea how bloated your ego sounds?
Granted, there are better designers and developers than I, as I'm unable to specialise in either, but not many designer/developer teams can create the kind of responsive, intuitive and attractive user experiences that I do.
"Responsive, intuitive and attractive" are all design properties.
Something goes missing when you start having to communicate your ideas to someone who doesn't understand both sides.
Then I'd suggest that you have a problem communicating. Show me a developer that cannot understand "responsive" and a designer that can't explain it. Show me a developer that needs to care about "intuitive and attractive" beyond the designer showing him where to put something.
I will agree that people like me are rare however.
Somebody with a massive ego but no real clue? Ten a penny.
Most designers look at me strangely when I start talking about code
Why are you talking to designers about code? Again, it sounds like you have poor communication skills and compensate by assuming that nobody can communicate effectively with "the other side".
Designers concern themselves with the interaction between the user and the computer. Developers concern themselves with the mechanics of making the interface work according to the design. If either cannot do that effectively, then they have no business in the job.
Then they became Engineers, who made things practical.
And now they are turning into Artists, to make them beautiful.
Oh, well...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I think software developers have the same percentage of good designers as the population at large, and vise versa. I've known some coders who were incredible graphic designers. But most of those people are not going to be interested in something like this, they do their HTML by hand :P
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
With both Acrylic Graphic Design and the Metro document format my life should soon be hell. Publisher and word are bad enough from a printing or reprographics point of view but two new file formats that will not play nice with any other non-microsoft or old-microsoft programs. Will not play nice with rips, platemakers and other specialized equipment and won't easily convert into something that will.
I could be wrong here but so far, Microsoft's history in this area is not good.
One is left brain. One is right brain.
Asking a coder to do artwork is silly.
Actually, both are artsy type of brain activities. Hence why good programmers usually have a good ability to work from both sides of the brain as well.
Go look up Bridged Brains, there are a lot of people out there that can use more of both sides of their brain at once, even if you can't.
Oh, also, these tools are for designers for the most part, not developers, developers take the output of these tools, shove it into Visual Studio for example, and code the backend to these interfaces.
Quartz Composer isn't really a design tool. It's a bit tricky to describe, you'll just have to use it.
BTW, Apple's been using the "Quartz" name for their graphics library since 10.1 shipped.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I happen to be employed as a designer/developer
You're what would be called a "technical artist" in the game development world. They're sometimes extremely useful for helping to glue parts of a project together. It can be a lonely position that places you between two worlds, but not fully in either of them. Loathed by programmers for having enough knowledge to damage the codebase, loathed by artists because you can patiently and accurately explain why using a 8192x8192 32-bit uncompressed texture for the app's splash-screen logo is a bad idea.
I've also never worked on a project that had more than one technical artist - I'm starting to believe that if you manage to get two technical artists in the same room (let alone working on the same project), they'll react and cause an explosion which destroys the universe.
most developers have absolutely no sense of aesthetics or design.
Oddly enough, user interface design was part of my Comp. Sci. degree - there's a whole subsection of Computer Science dedicated to man/machine interfaces. Most programmers (well, a few anyway) would agree that the most important part of a program as far as the user/client is concerned - is how the program interacts with the user.
The best programmers (or maybe just the ones who actually have a computer science degree) understand this. They may not be able to design an icon or choose a color scheme (which is where you should come in), but if pushed they should be able to make a basic UI design that is usable, neat and efficient. Neat and uncluttered UI design tends to help produce clean code anyway...
For data-collection apps, perhaps. But chances are these people will have had some training in usability and so forth, and instead of making some mockup in photoshop then relying on developers "translating" it, the idea of these tools are that the designer can just "draw" the interface and have it function, then the developers can just tie into it.
The idea being that developers find it hard to communicate what designers can and cannot do, and the difficulty of their work — now they don't have to. The prototype "design" is also the finished front-end.
This does not, to the best of my knowledge, cover data-collection, web-based front-ends. That's not the same. But as for an interface for a desktop app, it makes a lot of sense, particularly when things are getting to the level where designers have a lot of options as far as the design goes.
So, essentially, what it does is turn designers into proper designers, by giving them a tool that works exactly (give or take) like a design tool, but outputs sensible code, instead of the developer having to act as a proxy.
a) newsfactor totally got it wrong
b) from the promo video, i understand a main feature (at least for the web edition) is visual XAML design with a GUI designers are used to.
c) from the screenshots, the GUI does NOT look bad at all.
d) i'll give it a shot for two reasons: to see how quick you can (re)design a working XAML app, which is a totally sick adventure with the competitor, Macromedia Flex; and to see what MS means when saying "standards based".
"Responsive, intuitive and attractive" are all design properties.
Yes, but a designer doesn't develop the responsive interface, they usually create static designs and need to communicate to the developer how the interface reacts to the user, and I've seen developers get that wrong all too often.
Why are you talking to designers about code? Again, it sounds like you have poor communication skills and compensate by assuming that nobody can communicate effectively with "the other side".
I never said nobody can communicate effectively with "the other side", I merely said that someone with intimate knowledge of both sides would have a better chance of communicating with both sides, and if they're in charge of both design and development there is no need for that communication at all. It appears that I'm not the one with the communication problem in this case.
As to why I'm talking to designers about code, again it's about communication (that you seem to think I lack) - often programming constraints mean constraints are then placed on the design, and I like to explain to designers why something can't be done. Usually they're grateful for this, but sometimes I go a bit over their heads.
What is there to like?
People have been saying that for ever. Instead of really cool shit, we seem to perpetually just get the regular kind of shit.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Right, which is why you have crazed hooligans like Ansel Adams, who were all about blasting emotions onto negatives, and had no interest in structure.
(That is to say: I find your hypothesis wanting.
No, the goal isn't to turn designers into developers or vice versa. To anyone who has seen the Sparkle video the reason for this product should be fairly obvious. The point of these products is to allow the designer to interact directly with the developers.
Traditionally the designer would create a mock up which would be handed off to the developer to figure out how to implement.
While there are interface designers out there already, such as Glade designer and Interface Builder, none of them come close to touching Sparkle. Sparkle is effectively Adobe Illustrator and a UI designer built into one. The designer has full control over everything, including the ability to vastly alter the appearance of existing controls. With no code, the designer is fully capable of taking a stock radio button and modifying it's style to appear as a piece of paper which would rotate into view when selected. Can the Glade designer or Interface Builder do that? Of course not, a developer would have to write a new control to handle that sort of thing.
The point of Sparkle is to hand a designer a vector graphics editor that happens to create a real UI complete with controls that can be bound directly to the business models. The designer is no longer building prototypes and fighting with developers who themselves lack the graphical skills, the designer becomes, in essense, a developer who checks in and out code with graphical changes.
As much as you'd like to pretend, this is a paradigm shift. It takes the V of MVC and moves it's responsibility entirely to a different person. Nothing comes close to Sparkle.
It seems like most everyone is missing the point of the product(s).
I worked on a dot.com product that was part of the magical push technology that never happened. We had had an office full of developers, and half an office full of artists/designers. There was quite a bit of work needed to take the artwork and designs, done in Photoshop, illustrator etc, and cut them up, slice them, and hand code ways to interface with the images etc, while providing an environment with motion that we wanted to present to the users. I'd say at least %25 of the work, maybe more was dedicated to making the design work in the program.
That is the market being addressed here. It is not to make a developer into a designer, or a designer into a developer, it is to give the designer a new set of tools that is more closely tied to the end product AND to make it so the developer does not have to convert the design work into something useable in code.
If you have ever taken an application web site designed in Photoshop all the way through to a running deployed application used by hundreds of users you know what I mean. Yes, it is doable today, but a significant portion of the time is spent making the design work with the code, and still layout and look good. These products eliminate the middle work. I'm all for it.
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Most of the negative reaction here is due to the statement "Microsoft wants to turn developers into designers", but if you read the article, Microsoft didn't say that. Some industry analyst just pulled that out of his ass.
What this new stuff really does is *disconnects* the UI design from the source code, so that a designer can use one tool to work on the UI while a progammer uses visual studio to put some code behind it.
So rather than "turning designers into developers", it really "lets designers and developers work together better". Or something like that.
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